Kentucky on my mind

So the University of Kentucky lost the title game, and perhaps that was seen as a victory for those who dislike the lopsided recruiting of the contemporary moment, the way one school lands a half-dozen future NBA draft picks while other teams are lucky to field a single star. Of course, UConn has also had stacked teams in the past, so this year's final game was hardly a win for the little guy.

But I was also thinking of the flat tire I got on the highway in Kentucky on I-75, and how it was winter, but thankfully not too cold. Although Triple A took a good while to arrive, the Wal-Mart service center changed the tire very quickly, and I was able to drive the entire distance from Ohio to South Carolina in one day. My ten-hour drive turned into twelve, but I survived.

Finally, on the college front, I thought that I recently read that Ohio residents can pay in-state tuition to attend the University of Kentucky, but I can find no mention of this anywhere online. There do seem to be reciprocity agreements among smaller schools in those states.

A few weeks back, Dave Newman and I discussed Kentucky born-and-bred Chris Offutt's writing, and I think we agreed that we like his memoirs better than his fiction, and also that we both like No Heroes as well as the more commonly praised The Same River Twice.

Not once have I stopped at a KFC buffet or the "original restaurant" in Corbin, Kentucky although when I pass billboards advertising for such, I'm always tempted. This eliding of fried chicken is particularly sad to note because Corbin is often where I stay when I break the drive up into two days.

Fight for Your Leg Fried!

Cowboy Chicken in Xi'an, China

and in other news in the blue grass state

The Kentucky Wildcats, an 8th seed in their region, roared into the NCAA championship game last night on a three-pointer in the final seconds against Wisconsin. If they win the final game, then the small state of Kentucky will hold the men's basketball championship for the third consecutive year (UK won two years ago and Louisville last year).

But in another part of the college scene, where adjuncts struggle to survive while teaching many of our most economically vulnerable students, the story is not so rosy. In a blog, Christian L. Pyle reports on "Life in Adjunct America" for instructors at Bluegrass Community and Technical College. His writing includes these sobering notes:

In my previous article  on this subject, I revealed that I was suffering from depression and that I could date the beginning of the disease to my “adjunct awakening.”  I’m not alone.  In the comments on my article, Tim Arnold posted

"A colleague of mine at then-Lexington Community College, worked for years as an adjunct. Finally, they had no classes for him. I last saw him standing alone playing trombone at the amphitheater behind Memorial Chapel. His depression bloomed into a full flowered psychosis.  A coordinator of the Business Writing ‘department’ at UK died alone in his apartment under suspicious circumstances as his meager adjunct position began slipping away."

I did also see that Tennessee is strongly considering advancing two free years of community college to all of its high-school graduates, so there are also these glimmers of hope, that change can be effected, that learning, lives, and livelihoods can be improved.

Kentucky on my mind

Yeah, first they came for the Jews, and I was not a Jew, etc., but then, later, when the bars were closing down, they came for the KFC, and, well, frankly, I've lived most of my life like a fried, breaded drumstick stuck in the grease at the bottom of the bucket, wedged between an oppressive thigh and an angular wing with a pointy part in the small of my back, and what I'm trying to tell you is that even Chick-Fil-A cannot save us, no matter how well they crucify their Palin, from our complicity in the food riots that global future markets expect within a year.

Driving up here, I heard Michael Savage on the radio practically drooling as he described the murdered American embassy leader getting sodomized by the enemy, a story I have not seen acknowledged by mainstream media and hopefully this is not in the way that Savage would have you believe the mainstream media fails to acknowledge, and I guess all we can do is frequent KFCs the world over, with American pride and indigestion as we live our lives in defiance of everyone who hates us or just prefers we not hog so much of the dark meat and biscuits as we get caught reading and wondering about articles like this one.

(For all we know, Savage could be a secret Communist double agent because the weight loss advertisement in the middle of his website seems to clearly advocate against plucking from the bucket that extra piece of capitalist chicken!)

I guess it all returns to Kentucky, the last beautiful state I drove through before crossing into Ohio where in a second-hand bookshop on Friday evening, I found Kentucky writer Chris Offutt's short story "Second Hand" collected with others in a recent but remaindered Algonquin edition of best new stories from the South. (Is Kentucky in the South?)

May God Bless The Less United States of America.

And you, too.